Your Voice in My Head: A Memoir by Forrest Emma

Author:Forrest, Emma [Forrest, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590514474
Publisher: Random House Inc Clients
Published: 2011-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

IN CALIFORNIA, having composed the letter of explanation to Chistopher’s ex, I hit Send.

I sit back that night and say to myself, “That was properly mental. That’s borderline personality stuff and you don’t want to be that.”

Borderlines are what is commonly known as “evil.” They enjoy causing trouble.

The ex says she is shocked and disturbed by my confession and that she needs to think. I never hear from her again. I am taken off her friends list. It makes me think, though: I don’t lose friends as often as I used to.

Mum calls in the morning to tell me about the only cat she didn’t like.

“It was at a house we’d rented in Edinburgh, and it was in the garden and it looked exactly like a snake.”

“How can a cat look like a snake?”

“Well, it was long, and its body was the same width as its tail and it had no hair.”

The next day a thought occurs to me and I call Mum. “Is it possible that the cat you saw in Edinburgh was, in fact, a snake?”

She ponders this.

“Yes. I suppose it might have been.”

There are still minor daily spazz-outs in my happy life with Christopher. For example, a regular trip down to the Laurel Canyon Country Store to drink Lilly and Spike’s special coffee. When I get there, I see, tacked to the community noticeboard, an eight-year-old child’s multi-pose audition card, where he’s half-naked next to a lost-pet poster. The pet poster says: “Our beloved tortoise, Hokey Pokey, wandered off on Sunday. She has been with us for sixteen years. She is about a foot long.” This is the worst moment of my life. The man at the deli in front of me has a terrible comb-over. This is the worst moment of my life. The sandwich I buy contains wilted lettuce. This is the worst moment of my life. When I get home, my cat refuses to sit on me. Of course the fucking cat refuses to fucking sit on me. He’s a cat. And yet. This is the …

Still, Christopher and I keep homemaking and seeing movies and finding cheap eats in L.A. We go three times a week to Singapore’s Banana Leaf inside the Farmers Market until they start giving us free mango juice and, in a coup, free rice crackers. We hike Fryman together. He runs back and forth without his shirt, all crazy and Catholic and self-flagellating.

When it unpicks, we calmly follow the cotton as it unwinds. He doesn’t want to raise children in America and I do. I am second to the ocean, it is a religion I can’t understand and that I resent. It is the easiest, sweetest breakup. We go camping in the redwoods of northern California. We aren’t going there to break up with each other, or maybe we are. We visit the Henry Miller Library. We eat incredible pancakes. We hold each other. Then he asks if I want to stay together and I say “no” and I ask him and he says he doesn’t think we should stay together either.

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